Internet DNA Podcast

It is good, it is the best actually, but is it enough to stop Abi from falling asleep. Lots you need to know about email marketing… in fact so much that we will have to carry it on next week as well.

Transcription

This week's episode, Internet Dna. The APP. I'm just going to say I hope that my voice sounds amazing

because I'm feeling a bit like Tom Cruise sitting right in his helicopter because I'm wearing, I'm pretty great headset.

Oh, there. I haven't got the classes, so maybe I don't look quite right. Maybe not cool on, I haven't gotten dark hair. No, but you feel like that's the main thing. I bet you're like, nope, I'm looking out over the garden and I feel like having controlled, anyway, I had to brighten things out because we were going to be talking about in our marketing and I have to say, I look forward to doing internet DNA each week. I have not been the heel form to this one, so I hope Dan, you agreed to make it exciting and explain why we all just want to spend more time in email. He might maxing. Oh, brilliant. I love talking about email marketing. I actually send her throwing. It is,

it's not a tool. Boring. What do you mean good? Well, I like about modern marketing is how quickly you can get feedback. I'm talking about direct marketing. I'm not talking about brand marketing because most companies don't have a strong enough brand to do brand marketing, but direct marketing or they want me to just have quit. Do you get feedback now?

How'd you listed? It's between brand marketing and direct marketing.

Brand marketing. Is that it's Christmas. It's Coca Cola. Yeah. And we're not talking about the product. How are we were just saying Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Coca Cola, over and over and over again. And what we tried to do is when somebody arrives at supermarket, they feel more familiar with Coca Cola than any other brand.

Okay. So like apple never talk about their products and Marlboro the cigarettes, but they have really lovely pictures of calculate

there. Exactly. Because there's not a lot to talk about cigarettes. Really.

Yeah, that's positive.

What you're really trying to do is show a lifestyle, like if you'd like to be like a rugged cowboy type guy whilst dying of lung cancer, then you should smoke Marlboro. Or Peter. Stuyvesant was like, if you're an international playboy or play women and these not majors, you should be smoking the international passport to pleasure. I think was their thing. Big Brands do very brandy type. It's not about the product in the 90s and maybe early two thousands it was really associated with sound logos due to do or being bit, and that was a brand trying to get that thing into your head, that noise. It's a familiarity, not just jingles, but just that was their thing at the end of every one of their ads and it's designed to meet. Yeah,

that was a um, computer intel inside, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. It was a really nice, do you mean when I grew up, I always wants to be a jingle writer and she thought it was the icing on the carry.

Some guy in Portugal who was very proud of the fact that he wrote by four, three, two one dah, Dah, Dah, Dah for a chocolate bar.

Well, bend him to the reason I'm watching garages because I teach you could ban Bra, every stock. We left these little notes to prove that we'd be in there. And this one girl was just so poorly into coming up with these little rhymes of what the notes, oh is tingle of what those notes Ra to complete sort of very any usually it was dashed. Alas, this a little interlude for listeners. We had to change our recording system, so I do apologize if there is a difference in sound as we move into the next bit. But I'm still looking great. As I'm telling Dan, I've got bright red lights around my ears. I can see myself much clearer now cause it's a black screen and I'm still very happy. But Dan was saying that he couldn't hear me every time I mentioned the word. The word being email marketing. I think it's just the universe pointing out to me that is really boring. Why don't you keep saying that? Okay. They don't understand why you would say that. So we've talked about it. It was between brand marketing and direct marketing. Yes. Keep going. Why is it so exciting?

Well, okay, so why is it so exciting? This is your people talk all the time about communications. Yeah, and the fact is that for small business, the most effective way you can talk to people is email marketing. You can do your stuff on social, I know it will work and some people are very successful with their social media marketing. You could do it with Google ads and you can be quite successful with that as well. But the thing about email is it so much longer form, so you get to say what you want to say to people and you have a window of opportunity to talk to them in a quite direct way. And I'm going to explain this a big difference between what I call older style marketing, email marketing, which is the loads of images. Click here, click here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Which most of us are now blind too. Oh, I see a an an email coming in with loads of images on it. I just know it's marketing and I just skipped to the next email or very rarely read it unless it's really, really specific to something that I want. And actually a lot of those emails drive me just to find where's the unsubscribe link because it's too obviously promotion. The emails that you'll tend to respond to better in my research is where it actually looks like an email from some person so it doesn't have lots of graphics all over it. It just says, Hi Abby, I blah blah blah blah blah. If you're interested to find out more, click here just looks an email that you would receive from anybody else. That type of email, hey is quite quick to build and you can start to measure things that are really interesting about what is it that people respond to.

So as long as you have a marketing campaign, email marketing is not, I send out an email and hope it comes back. It's a conversation with somebody. And what you will start to find is that different messages appeal to different people and you can start to tie up those people with what they do with your company. So it's very, very important in any type of marketing to understand first of all, the segments within your market. And those might just be demographics, but they also might be what challenged do they interact with you on like social media people, how do they interact with me, website people, how do they interact with me? And then you'll find that actually they have different behaviors and the next thing to do would be to build a persona. But I don't think most companies have the time to really go into that. But what a persona is is one type of my user is Jane and she comes onto my site because it's convenient and her pain point is she needs to get something done quickly.

Okay. It's lucky you just asked to talk about personas because I was about to do a very loud your, because I know that email marketing's great. It works. Yes. I sell more pieces of art through my email marketing than I do anything else because I have people that actively strangely want to get these emails from me and they are pleased to receive them and therefore I agree. You're selling to a converted audience so it really works. Now I agree that you should be giving different messages for different types of audience. Now I break that down into different mail lists because I find it quicker. So I have a mail list that goes to interior designers. I have a mail list that goes to people that might be interested in our, I have a mail list that goes out to bloggers that might feature my work and I will send slightly different emails.

Yeah, so that's your segmentation

and say my personas would be the interior designer, the art lover and the blogger. But I am an artist and I send very visual emails. I have to,

because your products are very visual, but if I'm selling, let's say I'm trying to get people to move to my hosting, for example, to be honest, sending them a bunch of pictures about servers and internet, he looking things,

people looking really happy. It's a lifestyle. Get them to buy happy people and the girl on a phone that you've seen on every other wow images of like bungee jumping and drinking champagne and having a really nice life because that's how they'll feel if they host. See

jumping is perfect because if you're selling things to our adrenaline based,

no I wasn't saying that you're sending your hosting, but if you showed someone bungee jumping you could say look, you can live a really happy life and be like this person if you host with me. Cause they'll take all the stress away.

Yeah. But you know what I think really that's not what people care about. Hosting what people really care about hosting. Is it reliable? Is it cheap? Do I have to care about it?

Okay. So if I'm a bungee jumping company, carry on.

Let's say your a an experience his company. Yeah. It doesn't really matter what it is then yeah, you might say, actually I'm going to have a single image of bungee jumping, but that's not generally as effective what you're doing, which is product based images a fine because you sell art. It would be very odd to send an email saying I've got a load more. Right. Would you like to buy some? I'm not showing it to you.

Even increased people's interest.

But you know what I mean? Which is when you arrive at the email that the top bit of the email is just a picture and it's just like, really, I haven't got time for this. I'm going to move on. So most companies sell services really? And actually when you're talking about, I've got my segments of, I've got my art lovers, I've got my customers, and I've got my bloggers and they've actually got different messages. That's what I call segmentations. You could have that just in one list with a button, the chat boxes, as you might have a blogger who is also a customer. But what you'd want to do eventually is go right. The type of block the actually does highlight my art more often is this type of person. And I'm going to draw a persona about him. And the reason why you do a persona is so that you can say, if I was talking to Jane, what would Jane Care About? And because you've turned it into a quality person, it's much easier to imagine how you would message that person. Do you see what I mean?

Yeah, I do. It's a very nuanced difference, but it's quite clever because yeah, I can go, oh, I'm emailing all the bloggers, but if I actually stuck a picture of Jane and what she likes and what she does in front of me and I pretend I'm having a conversation with her, you're right. It's going to change slightly. Even though I knew I was emailing people at j and the very fact that I'm sitting there feeling I'm having a conversation with that would make a vast difference.

A lot of companies provide these marketing segments. One of them is experience. For example, we use a thing called mosaic and they say, if you give us a postcode, we can tell you who lives there. It's Abby, but we could say they live near Woodbridge. It's quite an rt place. They're living in this type of house and this type of area. Now they're not going to get 100% because obviously the guy who lives below me or the guy that lives below him, we are probably all a little bit different. But what they can say is on average, this is the type of person that lives in these types of places and what they do is provide you personas and they literally have photographs like what are the things that they do, what does a family look like? And they break it down like what is their medium income?

What are the things that they do, what are they interested in? So they create these personas to allow you to market these people even though you may never have actually spoken to them. So we use this for looking at our subscriber lists. We've got 100,000 subscribers. We can send all the postcodes and what they'll then give you back is your waiting and they'll say, right, you've got a lot of, let's say k six is and case seven. And they create these trees where you can then see who comes before the case Evans who were the proceeding branch. So that you can see who do you need to market to for tomorrow's customers. The thing I love about modern marketing is how quickly you get feedback so you can test headlines. For example, on Google PPC you can put 10 different headlines in there and see which one gets the highest click through rate within a couple of hours. You can have literally some market research done and that was so difficult previously. Are you still with us Abby?

Hello?

Did you fall asleep?

No, I didn't fall asleep. There's an amazing profiling tool on u Gov that you put in some information and it gives you these fantastic pictures of everything that gets in this area might be into and it's free. It's actually designed to be fair. If he just looked for Yougov profiling,

that's enough about segments and so forth. I mean the real key to email marketing, like everything else is just turning up, so have a schedule. Make sure you do it. Often. Always have a call to action link and preferably don't have too many, unless you're selling products where each product will have a link, have one thing to say and just say it really well and then measure it.

If you were sending an email to a friend,

yeah, exactly. Did they reply? No. Why not? They don't like me anymore or do you know what I mean? So with all marketing, in fact with everything to do with the web turning up is 99% of the game you just keep doing it. It will really start to give you results and obviously you can use MailChimp or campaign monitor or whatever works for you and they will be different. But mostly they're much of a muchness and when you're starting out, MailChimp is as good as any.

That's quite a good one. Now it's fairly simple to use. I'm wondering if the newer ones such as Squarespace don't get stuck in your promotion tab so quickly, would that be true?

Often with that promotion tab, it's to do with how you've managed your SPF records and there's a certain, a bit of learning about it. So if you sending it to a mailing list, some email system, send it to like a box called a list, and some email systems actually send individual emails to each person and that can help you not go in that list. But if enough people mark you as promotion, you're going in there, whatever you do, it's just one of those things that's the bad part of Ai Really. So you've got to be slightly careful about how you send them, what sends it.

If you know people aren't, Marcie has promotion mainly because a lot of your clients just don't know how to do that. Is it the fact that millions of other emails that have come from example, MailChimp, so not just your mail, but yeah, MailChimp and therefore MailChimp as a rule is being pushed into promotion. Yes.

So g mail actually looks at the content of the email and decides whether that looks like it's promotional. It's going to look at things like, is it always got the same bits and pieces in it? Does it basically just change the content? But the layer always stays the same. So it's going to do some AI over it as well. Yeah. The thing is to use something like SendGrid and that allows you to use your actual own mail servers or to offload your mail servers. Or there's things like mail gun, which are literally just email deliverability. They're not marketing system. They do actually now start to have marketing bits to them, but really they're just lists and delivery systems.

Okay. So these ones, SendGrid and Americana, quite interesting. I, that's my main problem and I think everybody's main problem is being put in the promotions tab and people just not knowing.

Yeah. And obviously that MailChimp use these IP addresses and you will suffer from it because you've got a lot of product images in that. Yes, you're an artist, so you'll suffer from it more than I will because I don't send those type of emails like generally saying, dear John, it's not me. It's you type emails. I don't, I come up against that problem quite so much.

So tell me about some other useful tip for email marketing that's going to make me happy.

Personalization is really important.

By easy with, yeah, like MailChimp now to put that in and that's good.

And you can actually do really interesting things. So you can create one email and then you could have different sections that go in depending on what segment people are in. So you don't have to have different mailing lists. In fact, usually the best way if you're a single company is to have one mailing list with lots of segmentation in it. That would be a big thing for me is try and keep everything in one meeting list, even if you have very distinct segments in there. Because you may find that people move from one to the other. And actually under Gdpr you're going to have problems, which is like what mating this to you in. And when you've only got three, that might be fine. But if you're a big company, you might find you've got 30 40 less. Once someone asks to delete you from there, you've actually got to think about where is all this information?

Can you say you gotta be in it to win it? So how often should I be sending emails out? Ah,

you're going to find this out because the thing to do is take a sensible default. You send them every week, fortnight, whatever months, depending on what type of email you're sending. So for you sailing art, you're probably not generating a vast amount of new artwork every week. aSo monthly might work for you, but then for a while, try to weekly and see what happens. You know, this is the thing about all marketing is you must task all the time. You're just doing

hi monthly. Well, there you go. Let The bimonthly bandwagon. Yeah,

well, there you go. Perfect. But you should probably try it. What happens if I send it monthly? Do I get a sales pick up or do I get subscriber dropoff like demerol, people unsubscribe.

The statistics you get in male clients like MailChimp, uh, fascinating and

really very accessible and easy to use. Yeah. And so what you're watching is deliverability, how many people opened, how many people clicked, and how many people unsubscribed. And those are your real three things. If loads of people open and nobody clicks your messages wrong,

I'm afraid, Dan, we ask time. So we're gonna have to finish this off next week. So a quick goodbye for me and we'll carry on with your day. Bye. Bye. Yeah.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.